Indigenous rights in, over or to research?

Abstract

(Watch the RECORDING.)

The question of rights in Indigenous research contains a set of conflicting principles: If the result of the research is decided by people outside of the relevant research project, we no longer have a free research, and might as well hand over the job to spindoctors. We will thus argue for free research when it comes to research results; any alternative to that will undermine the validity of the research conducted.

When it comes to the choice of research topics, however, the situation is different. This is a question of pre-scientific choice, and here the researcher does not have more to say than others. Evidently, the researcher may identify topics as more or less promising, but the desicion on where to allocate resources for research is a political one, ultimately going back to who has the control over those resources. University research has a tradition of leaving such decisions to individual researchers, whereas funding agencies to an increasing degree aim at governing the choice of research topics.

There are known diverging opinions both within and between Indigenous communities on how to approach language and language technology research. Some Indigenous language communities are opposed to any research on their language (by outsiders) – they welcome research but want to keep the language data for themselves – and still others prefer to publish all Indigenous text for anyone to build language models on.

The discussion also depends upon the desired goals of the approach: Should languages be documented in their traditional form for archiving, or should they be standardised and thus optimised for language revitalisation? To which extent and in which way can generative AI influence negatively or positively upon language technology work?

In the talk, we will present the different views and discuss the pros and cons of the different approaches.